When a man says he’s losing his mind over a woman, he means it

Next to my desk I have a pile of newspaper clippings, magazine pages and hand-written notes full of ideas for blog posts. Every now and then I go through it and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

Take this two-page spread from the January 12, 2014, USA Weekly. One side features pictures of Christina Ricci, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Bell; the other has an ad for the Just Stop It, the “Hot & Gorgeous Bandeau Bra That You’ll Love To Show Off!”

The Just Stop It, “the first strapless tube top bra to give you the support you deserve,” has Super Stretch!, erases back fat and delivers NO MORE SAGGING BUST!

But the other page has Christina Ricci, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Bell.

Was I interested in the bra, or the babes? A year later, I can’t remember.

The stack also includes a slew of cartoons illustrating the different approaches men and women take to fashion. For instance, in Mr. Boffo, a woman with her eyes popping and mouth drooling says to her husband, “Here comes Babette in the tiniest topless, backless, frontless, see-through string…sandals.” He looks less than thrilled.

And in an Arlo & Janis, bride-to-be Mary Lou excoriates her fiance Gene for not informing his mother that attire for the wedding will be “dressy casual.” Gene leaves the room to dutifully call his mom and deliver the crucial news: “Mary Lou said dress casual.”

Somewhat related is a bit I wrote down from comedian Pat Dixon. He said, “Women have larger corpus callosums than men, which means women think with their whole brains. Which sounds great, but it’s not. Because what it does is conduct a lot of emotional input into every logical decision. A man has an underdeveloped corpus callosum. It’s puny. So when a woman asks if she should wear the red one or the blue one, the skirt or the jeans, the shoes or the boots, with or without the belt, I want to crap in my hands and throw it at her.”

Why didn’t any of my high school science teachers ever explain anything that clearly?

A newspaper story from October 9, 2012, muddied the waters, though, with a report saying that regardless of whether men get women, women should get men becausefemale brains include tiny bits of male genetic material.

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. Dissecting the brains of deceased women, University of Washington study researchers found “fetal DNA that could only have come from a male.” The researchers couldn’t say if it came from babies the women carried, brothers who inhabited their mother’s wombs before them, or if it migrated through generations from their grandfathers or uncles.

In an unrelated article, though, Shape magazine reported that a Kinsey Institute study showed that men like to be hugged—and that women who understand that and hug them are more likely to get laid. That understanding may be the result of learning, but it could also be that the globs of male cells at the fringes sometimes cut through the noise about cute shoes and the nuances between plain-old casual and casual/whatever with a message like, “Hug him!” Where women get the idea that they must stop their boobies from drooping I don’t know. All the male parts are saying is, “Boobies!”

Was that what I was thinking? Probably not. But linking all this stuff together must make me seem a lot smarter. And I’d say I did all right for a person who apparently lost a chunk of his already diminutive corpus callossum before he was even born.